


Rewritten

by laurus_nobilis



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Time Travel Fix-It, Time Travel Fix-it - Time Travelers Disagree On How To Fix The Problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 14:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17551613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurus_nobilis/pseuds/laurus_nobilis
Summary: “We’re lost in space, yes. And we just happened to find a convenient wormhole? I don’t trust that,” Nebula said.It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. In most situations, Tony would have agreed with her. It smelled like a trap. But this time… this time, the ridiculous level of coincidence could be a good sign.“A one in fourteen million chance,” he said under his breath. “That bastard. He knew.”(After being left alone on Titan, Tony and Nebula try to fix the universe. They get some help along the way.)





	Rewritten

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maidenjedi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/gifts).



> I hope you enjoy this story! :)
> 
> The title is a nod to Doctor Who's _The Big Bang_.

At first, when Tony realized that Nebula was stuck in that planet just like him, he was relieved. It could be a tiny, tiny good thing, in the middle of this whole mess. More brains, more hands, more chances of escape - and she’d brought a ship. At the very least, it couldn’t be worse than being on his own.

It didn’t take long until he almost wished he’d been alone after all, and by now, he was starting to reconsider the ‘almost’.

He had neatly put his grief aside so he could focus on planning. Or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, planning was important. They would need to do that anyway and if it stopped his mind from replaying the image of people turning to dust right in front of his eyes, well, he wasn’t going to complain about that. But he needed to concentrate, and Nebula’s impatience was starting to get old.

She must have been getting bored again at the moment, because she stomped until she was right in front of him, proving him right. Again.

“Stop fooling around!” she snapped. “We have to do something!”

“I _am_ doing something. I’m thinking.”

“Think, think. That’s all you ever do. This inaction needs to stop now.”

“All right, then, what’s your plan?”

“Chase him,” she said, making it sound like the most obvious thing in the world. “Go to your planet.”

“Great idea!” Tony said, opening his arms wide. “Never would have thought of that. Just one simple question: how?”

Nebula glared at him.

“Minor details.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re drifting in a tiny ship in the middle of nowhere. No food, no water, and sure as hell no way back home. So, yes. We kinda need some thinking right now. And even if we do manage to somehow reach Earth, what makes you think Thanos would still be there? He obviously got what he wanted. No need to stick around.”

“The people who remain there can tell us what happened. We can find out where he went next.”

“Or they could have no idea and we’ll have wasted time and resources we don’t have on a gamble.”

“Afraid of what you might find, Terran?”

So. Nebula didn’t pull any punches, did she. Tony thought of everyone he had left behind on Earth, everyone who was still unaccounted for. Pepper, Rhodey, Happy, his friends, his ex-friends and his ‘it’s complicated’ ones. Everyone. For all he knew, he might get back home just to find some piles of ash.

“I don’t have anything left to lose,” he lied.

“Well,” she said, “that doesn’t make you special.”

Tony ran his hands through his hair in frustration, because the alternative was punching her in the face and that wouldn’t be productive.

“You know, the attitude’s not helping.”

“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child!”

“Don’t act like one!”

He immediately regretted saying that. Nebula’s glare had just gone from ‘frustrated’ to ‘might actually shoot someone’. Fortunately, it looked like she thought better of it. She just crossed her arms and kicked one of the ship’s walls.

“Look,” he said, before things escalated, “we’re both on edge here. We should just… try not to kill each other. That wouldn’t help.”

Nebula seemed to consider it. After a moment, she spoke again.

“A compromise,” she said. “I’ll set a course towards Terra - yes, I know you don’t think we’ll get there, let me finish - and you can continue with all your thinking while we’re going somewhere instead of drifting around like fools.”

That wasn’t Tony’s ideal situation, but at least it wasn’t as bad as it could be, either. And he didn’t have a better plan. Yet. If this kept Nebula off his back for a while, so be it.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Set the course. It’s your ship.”

Nebula turned around and did so, without so much as a nod.

* * *

Days passed. Water was scarce, food was worse, and they were still insanely far away from Earth. Far from anywhere, for that matter. The worst part was that Tony wasn’t doing much better in the ‘come up with a plan’ department, either. Everything lead to a dead end. The only useful thing he’d managed to do so far, for a certain value of the word, was send a message home. Well, attempt to send one. He had no way to know if anyone would receive it. He most certainly did not expect an answer.

Then, all of a sudden, something happened.

“Stark,” Nebula called him through the ship’s comm system, “come look at this.”

He made his way to the cockpit and, once he arrived there, he didn’t even need to ask why she’d called him. It was in clear view right in front of him. Something he’d once hoped he would never have to see again. Now, however, at least it was a change. It might even be a change for the better.

“How did you manage to bump into a wormhole?”

“I didn’t,” she grunted. “We’re still on the right course. And that wasn’t there a moment ago.”

“That makes no sense.”

“I know. That’s why I called you. You’re the nonsense expert.”

“Yeah, well, you clearly don’t know me well enough yet. My usual approach to understanding new nonsense is to poke it and see what happens.”

Nebula finally stopped staring at the screen ahead of her, just to turn around and glare at him.

“We’re not getting in there.”

“We probably should,” he pointed out. “I get it, you know, I’m not a big wormhole fan myself. But we’re lost in space and it just happened to open up right in front of us. I say we give it a chance.”

“We’re lost in space, yes. And we just happened to find a convenient wormhole? I don’t trust that,” Nebula said.

It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. In most situations, Tony would have agreed with her. It smelled like a trap. But this time… this time, the ridiculous level of coincidence could be a good sign.

“A one in fourteen million chance,” he said under his breath. “That bastard. He knew.”

“What are you talking about now?”

“Strange,” Tony explained. “He said we were in the endgame. That this was the only way, and I’m getting the feeling that ‘this’ means you and me and this helpful wormhole.”

They looked at each other in silence for a second. The argument Tony had expected never came.

“Fine,” Nebula said instead. “It can’t get worse.”

That was all the warning he got before Nebula practically threw the ship into the wormhole’s mouth.

It was a dizzying, confusing sensation. The fact that Tony hadn’t eaten in days was probably not helping, either, but he was pretty sure that this wouldn’t have been pleasant even in normal circumstances. On the other hand, it didn’t seem to affect Nebula too much. He wondered if it was because of her species and enhancements, or because she was more used to space travel than he was, or maybe both. He’d probably never find out because even if he did ask, she wouldn’t tell him. That much he was certain of. Even if it was just to piss him off.

He was also certain that this whole ‘think about random stuff to forget you’re about to throw up your guts’ strategy wasn’t a good plan at all in the long term, so he really hoped the arrived where it was that they were headed to very soon.

Once they slowed down and Tony managed to stop feeling like everything around him was still spinning, he looked up at the screens again. Everything looked more or less the same as before they started, which made no sense. They weren’t supposed to still be surrounded by colorful cloud shapes, he was pretty sure of that.

“What happened?” he asked. “Aren’t we out?”

“I can’t tell,” Nebula admitted. She looked like she hated having to say that. “The readings are strange. I don’t know where it sent us. And I don’t see an exit…”

Then, even as she spoke, things got even weirder. Instead of a single wormhole opening in front of them, there were several. Then many. Then a whole damn lot. And each of them was like a little screen, showing them different scenes looping over and over. Most of them showed places that Tony didn’t know. Alien planets, he figured, given the non-human species and the weird landscapes in them. There were some scenes that he wasn’t familiar with either, but he could make an educated guess as to what they were about: Thanos and his goons destroying what looked like a high security building; a huge battle where he could recognize T’Challa; Thor, looking defeated and missing an eye, surrounded by dead people.

“I think,” he said, almost talking to himself, “I think we have a choice to make here.”

“Of course we do. We can’t stay here forever.”

“Yes, but we can’t pick an exit at random either. This could be our chance. We can fix this.”

Nebula frowned at him, but she did look at least a little bit curious.

“What do you mean?”

“Thanos won already. We know that. So some of these,” he waved his arm in the screen’s general direction, “have already happened.”

“So you want us to jump into a second wormhole and hope we time travel. Seriously?”

“Seriously. Damn, Strange _did_ know about this. He’ll never let us hear the end of it if it works.”

For a moment, Nebula looked actually thoughtful. She’d been pretty good at keeping a tough face ever since they left Titan, but just now, she was letting the tiniest bit of vulnerability shine through.

“But,” she started, very slow, “you think it can work?”

“I think we need to try.”

Nebula didn’t push back against that, which was a pleasant surprise. Instead, she nodded again and gave an attentive look at the screens.

“All right. Then we just need to find the exit we want.”

“Well, kind of. We need to figure out what we want to do in the first place.”

“No, that part is obvious,” she said. “We make it so Thanos never existed in the first place.”

Tony blinked. That was certainly not what he had expected to hear from her.

“Even if that wasn’t a logistical nightmare,” he said, “what about you? If there was no Thanos, what would that mean for you?”

Nebula shrugged.

“I’d be a normal little girl who never left her home planet. It doesn’t sound too bad.”

“But your whole life!” Tony insisted. “Your… _you_. What about all of that?”

“Who cares? I wouldn’t miss it. I wouldn’t even know I’d ever had it. And even if I did, it’d be worth it if none of this mess ever happened.” She paused and squinted at him, as if trying to decide how best to convince him. “Your planet would be better off, too. No Thanos, no invasion to Terra.”

No Avengers, Tony thought. But that was a concern that he didn’t voice. If Nebula was willing to give up her entire personal history, she’d probably just tell him to go find himself new friends. That kind of argument wouldn’t work. The good thing was, he still had a lot of very rational arguments to make anyway.

“It’s still a logistical nightmare,” he insisted. “Not just figuring out how to get a Thanos-less universe, though that’s bad enough. The real problem is that it’s too far back. It changes too much.”

“We _want_ to change things, Stark.”

“Within reason! Hell, you think I don’t get it? That I’m not itching to go back and fix every single mistake I ever made?” He had to stop himself there, because that line of thought was going nowhere good very fast. “Look, it’s just— there are way too many variables. We don’t know what a universe where Thanos never existed look like. For all we know we could be making things much worse.”

“What could possibly be worse than Thanos?”

“Honestly? I don’t want to imagine it.”

Without any kind of warning, Nebula stood up forcefully and kicked the pilot’s chair in the process. Tony was glad that she had taken to letting off steam by hitting inanimate objects and not him. He’d seen the dents she’d left on some walls. 

“Then what?” she asked, still angry. “Say I listen to you and we don’t do it my way. What’s _your_ great plan?”

“The exact opposite,” Tony said after a moment’s thought. “We get him right before he dusts everyone. Of course it’s not as easy as just jumping into the right wormhole, I mean, the surprise factor can help, but we need to figure out how to stop him for real before he just goes and does it again—”

“No,” she interrupted.

“ _What_?” Tony stopped in the middle of his brainstorming aloud session and stared at her in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? This is the best way— hell, it might be the only way.”

“No,” Nebula insisted. She didn’t feel like explaining herself any further. Tony was about ready to punch a wall himself.

“Uh, yes. We’re doing it. It has to be right before the Snap. I already told you, we can’t risk going too far back. This way we save the universe and we don’t lose anything.”

“We lose Gamora.” She held his gaze, and it was clear that she wasn’t about to change her mind about this anytime soon. “If I have to keep my stupid past, then I deserve to keep my sister.”

“That’s selfish.”

“Really, Terran?”

“Hey, it sucks, okay? I know that. I’m not exactly happy about it either. But we have to think big, here. It’s the universe we’re talking about.”

“What if it was the boy?” Nebula asked. That stopped Tony in the middle of the rant he’d been building up to. “If he died before your perfect moment? Would you be thinking about the universe?”

Tony didn’t have an answer for that. His slight moment of hesitation was enough for Nebula to notice and smirk at him. It was a bitter gesture, anyway.

“We find a middle ground,” she said, “or else.”

* * *

It soon became obvious that arguing about possible plans in the abstract wasn’t going anywhere. They decided to slowly move around, making sure not to get inside any of the wormhole’s exits just yet, but taking a better look at them and figuring out what the actual possibilities were. Some of them might spark a workable idea.

“There are way too many of these,” Nebula grumbled about ten minutes in. “We’ll never find the right one. We don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

As much as Tony hated to agree, he had to. This hadn’t cut down on their options as much as he had expected.

“There has to be a more efficient way to do this,” he said. “Maybe if we focus on the ones that show the Stones. That might be what we need to change, actually. We could try to stop Thanos from getting them in the first place.”

“That’s easier said than done. And we’d still have to find the right exits,” she pointed out.

“Can’t be that hard. They’re the ones with colorful glowy stuff.”

Nebula glared at him, but she couldn’t come up with a better idea. She made the ship go just a little bit faster, and Tony kept an eye out for the tell-tale glow of the Stones.

He got bored again in about five minutes.

“Okay,” he admitted, “this isn’t working.”

“I told you so.”

“Yeah, that’s really helpful. Ever heard of _constructive_ criticism?”

“I’m not in the mood for your sad attempts at jokes, Stark. We need a plan. A real one, and now.”

“How about you come up with one, then?”

“How about you ask your smug friend with the fourteen million futures?”

Tony was about to reply, but he didn’t, because all of a sudden everything clicked. He could tell from Nebula’s now wide-eyed expression that she’d just had the same idea.

“You know what,” he said, “that jerk deserves it. Let’s go pay him a visit.”

“That’s the least bad plan you’ve had so far,” said Nebula, and she turned back towards the controls one last time. “Didn’t we just see him a while ago?”

“Yes, a couple of exits back. I think he was in New York.” Tony leaned forwards, taking an even closer look at the screens as Nebula turned around and retraced their path. “There! That’s him, getting into that building.”

This time, he was prepared for Nebula’s lack of warnings. He held on to a chair and braced for the upcoming trip. The universe swirled around him once more.

* * *

They half-landed, half-crashed their ship right on Strange’s doorstep. It was going to attract a lot of curious onlookers, but Tony couldn’t bring himself to care. The wizards could put some kind of magical cloaking device on it if it bothered him. Right now, they were in a hurry.

Both Strange and Wong ran out the door straight away. Nebula had just managed to come out of the ship and Tony was still halfway inside it when both men arrived next to them, both holding that stance that promised either martial arts or magical glowy stuff.

“Stark?” Recognizing him didn’t make Strange lower his arms. “What are you doing here? And who’s—?”

“You can blame this on your future self,” Tony interrupted him. “Let us in, we’re trying to save the universe here.”

Wong and Strange exchanged a look, then Wong nodded.

“All right,” he said. “But don’t touch anything.”

They led them into the Sanctum. Nobody did anything about the crashed ship, and there were no curious New Yorkers gathering round it, so Tony assumed he’d been right about them having some kind of illusion protecting the building. The important part was that it didn’t look like anyone would bother them. For the first time in days, he felt himself actually relax a little bit, and not only from sheer exhaustion.

“We need food,” Nebula demanded. “We’ve been stranded in space for days.”

“You look like it,” said Strange. “What happened? And, you know, who are you exactly?”

“We’ll tell you everything once we get a sandwich. And water,” Tony replied. Now that he had acknowledged the very real possibility of getting something to eat and drink, he didn’t want to waste precious seconds with introductions.

The wizards had their priorities right and got them some food before insisting on answers. Maybe they really _did_ look that bad. Tony would rather not think about it. Once they were all settled down, it was time for explanations. Nebula took care of most of the Thanos related parts, since she was the expert there. Tony took over for the parts about what had happened on Earth, and then he explained Strange’s own so-called plans to him.

“That does sound like you,” said Wong with a knowing look. Strange didn’t bother to deny it, but he frowned in confusion.

“But how did you manage to travel back to now?”

“There was a wormhole,” said Nebula in between bites of her third sandwich.

They quickly explained the last part of their trip, along with their discarded plans.

“I still think interrupting him when he’s trying to get the Stones is the best idea,” Tony said when they were done. “We can’t go too far back and can’t stay too close. But the problem’s still when. And how.”

“We need more information,” Strange began to say, and then Bruce fell from the sky.

* * *

Another round of explanations and sandwiches later, Bruce was filled in about the situation and a little bit less on edge. Poor guy seemed to be weirded out by Tony’s lack of surprise about seeing him and the whole Thanos news. It was for the best, though. This time around they had half a plan.

“We know we can’t beat Thanos on Titan,” Tony said, “and it sure looked like they couldn’t beat him later here on Earth. So our guess is that we need to stop him before he gets enough Stones.”

Bruce shook his head.

“He only had one of them when he attacked our ship, and it was already too much.”

“We need to destroy the ones we can get,” Nebula said. “It’s the only way. You had one, Xandar had one, there’s-”

“We’re not destroying the Time Stone,” Strange interrupted her. 

“We don’t even know if we _can_ destroy them,” Tony said before those two could start arguing for real. “What are we going to do, cast them into the fires of Mount Doom?”

Nebula gave him a very confused look, but Bruce widened his eyes as if he’d just had an idea.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait, Thor said— before we found out that Loki had the Tesseract, he told Thanos it’d been destroyed in Ragnarok. That could do it.”

“That’s my Bruce!”He patted his friend on the back. “That’s what we need to do, make sure Loki leaves the Tesseract right where it is. Hell, as long as we’re time traveling, we can take Xandar’s Stone there for good measure.”

“You are insane.” Nebula was glaring at him again. “I said _destroy_ the Stones, not move them around. It’s too dangerous. Do you think Thanos will just let that happen? As soon as he realizes we have the Power Stone, he’ll follow us to Asgard.”

“Exactly! It doesn’t even matter if Ragnarok can destroy the Stones or not. The important thing is to get Thanos away from the people he’d kill and into a planet that’s about to get blown to pieces.” 

Nebula frowned at him for a while, as if she was looking for something to criticize. She didn’t seem to find it. 

“I still don’t like it,” she grumbled at last. “But if Ragnarok itself doesn’t get rid of him, nothing will.”

“Actually,” said Wong, “we might be able to help with that.”

Everyone turned to stare at him. Even Strange, Tony noticed, which was kind of great.

“It’s possible to open ways into other dimensions. Difficult, but possible. With something like Ragnarok going on, reality is going to be weaker already. It could give us a boost. Besides, we’d have three Stones and Thanos still none.”

“That makes sense,” Strange mused. “Between the two of us, we might pull it off.”

“Three,” said Bruce. “Loki has magic, too. Maybe he can help.”

This time, everyone turned to stare at _him_.

“Really?” Tony asked. “Look, I know you said he helped, but he was saving his own skin too. I’m not convinced that Loki’s a good guy.”

“Maybe good guy’s a stretch,” Bruce admitted, tilting his head. “But I can tell you one thing for sure, he won’t complain about kicking Thanos to a different universe.”

“Good enough for me,” Nebula muttered. “It doesn’t matter if he helps or not, anyway. We just need to make sure he leaves the Tesseract where it is. And if he doesn’t cooperate, I’ll make him.”

“You… do remember _you’re_ a good guy, right?” Tony asked. She gave him a level look.

“I am. I’m saving the universe.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” said Strange, who looked like he was vaguely worried that they were going to start fighting right then and there. “And speaking of getting there - we need to start by Xandar, in the near past.”

“Slight problem,” said Nebula. “They don’t exactly like me on Xandar.”

“We’ll have to risk it,” said Strange. “Moving around will be complicated enough as it is without separating, we can’t get picky. We go together everywhere.”

“So, how does that work? You guys open one of those portal things and we jump in?” Tony asked.

“Crude,” Strange replied, “but yes. Pretty much. We use the Time Stone to home in on where and when we’re headed, and open a way.”

“Great. Then let’s stop wasting time and go.”

No one had any objections to that. There only a few quick preparations to make sure everyone was ready. Then Strange and Wong did their magic thing together. After a short moment of what looked almost like static, the image on the other side became clear: a heavily guarded hall leading to a vault. It was time to jump in there and get everyone’s attention.

* * *

Nova Prime didn’t look impressed. Then again, she seemed to be the kind of person who looked like that most of the time, so Tony didn’t take it personally. The woman was taking things pretty well considering that a bunch of people had opened a portal right into a high security building, one of whom had last been seen helping the guys who wanted to destroy the planet. A few of the guards were giving Nebula suspicious glances, but she didn’t look impressed, either.

Once they got Nova Prime to listen to their story, her expression finally showed some human— well, technically not _human_ emotion, Tony supposed. But the concern was visible even though she kept her professional attitude.

“You’re telling me,” she said, “that your entire plan hinges on getting Thanos to hunt you.”

“That’s the general idea, yes,” Tony replied.

“It’s the dumbest plan I have heard in my life.”

“It’s still the best one we got. And it’ll take the Stone off your hands. It’s a definite win for you.”

“He’s coming,” Nebula said. She was leaning against a wall with her arms crossed, like she didn’t have a care in the world, and if she was trying to sound intimidating then she was succeeding. “As long as the Stone is here, he’s coming.”

Nova Prime held her gaze, still keeping her calm expression.

“We accepted that risk when we chose to protect it.”

“And you failed. We saw what happens. You all die, and you don’t protect it. So what’s the point?”

For a few moments, the room filled with unspoken tension. Even the guards looked like they didn’t know what to expect. Fortunately, Nova Prime was the kind of person who had the right priorities. Someone else might have started a fight. She glared at Nebula as if she was trying to set her on fire with her eyes, but didn’t let her anger stop her from being reasonable.

“I have plenty of doubts about this,” she said. “But it does seem to be our only chance.”

“So you’ll give us the Stone?” Tony asked.

“We’ll entrust it to the Masters of the Mystic Arts.”

Tony had to make a real effort not to roll his eyes and ruin the mood. Nebula didn’t bother. But Wong received the Stone in its container with all the seriousness it deserved, and he and Nova Prime nodded politely at each other.

“Good luck,” she said. Tony wished he believed in it.

* * *

Their next stop was Asgard. More specifically, Odin’s vault of treasures. The first thing Tony noticed when he stepped out of the portal was the unmistakable blue glow of the Tesseract. The second one was Loki, who was carrying a strange helmet-like thing, just about to grab it. He looked up at the portal and Tony half expected an attack - but Loki just looked annoyed.

“Ugh, _wizards_ ,” he said. Then he seemed to notice Bruce. “Wait, how are _you_ down here?”

“Time travel,” Bruce said with a small shrug.

“That’s right. We come with a warning from the future.” Tony paused and blinked. “Funny, I always thought if I’d ever said that it’d be to myself.”

“Is that so?” Loki had the gall to look smug. “Because from here, it just looks like you’re trying to get me to give this up. Now, I know I can be very intimidating, but I—”

“Thanos is going to hunt and kill you,” Nebula interrupted him.

It was blunt, but effective. Loki went pale as a sheet.

“You’re bluffing,” he said, but it was clear that he didn’t believe it himself.

“He’s on his way here right now,” she said.

“You lead Thanos here? Are you mad?”

“We have a plan, actually,” said Tony. “Maybe shut up for two seconds and listen.”

Surprisingly, he did. This new-and-maybe-improved Loki was a lot to take in, but right now, Tony wasn’t complaining. Maybe it was true that he wasn’t so bad now, maybe he was just outnumbered, who cared. The important part was getting him to help or, at the very least, to not make things worse. That seemed to be working.

“Then we all need Ragnarok to happen,” he said, after their short explanation. “I have to take the crown to the Eternal Flame. We’ve already wasted too much time.”

“We’re not the ones who stopped to steal an Infinity Stone,” Nebula muttered, but they let him run off. If he didn’t come back, so be it. What mattered now was that he had left the Tesseract where it was.

“And now we wait,” said Strange. “Well. Wait, and hope Thanos does get here before this whole place gets destroyed.”

“He will.” Wong sounded pretty certain of it. “He won’t resist the lure of three Stones together. This is like a beacon for him.”

There was a sudden rumble, like an earthquake. Surtur, Tony guessed. Things were going to get dangerous very soon. But there was no sign of Thanos. It was making him far too anxious, so he distracted himself with questions. Besides, annoying Strange helped.

“So,” he began, “that wormhole thing. How did that happen?”

“Is this really the time, Stark?”

“Why not? We can’t do anything but wait right now. And I honestly don’t get the wormhole. Sure, sure, future-you did your gazing into the future thing and saw us finding it, I get that part. But how was it there in the first place?”

“Would you believe it if I said it was fate?”

Tony gave him a deadpan stare. Strange shrugged.

“Then think about it as the universe trying to preserve itself.”

“That’s still not an answer.”

“Because there is no answer,” Wong intervened, exasperated. “He saw that it would be there, but that doesn’t mean he knows why. Just don’t expect him to ever admit that he doesn’t know something.”

“Wow, thanks,” said Strange. “You’re such a great friend.”

Tony was good enough at reading sincerity disguised at sarcasm to realize that he did, in fact, mean that. He could also tell that Wong’s eyeroll in response to that was far more affectionate than annoyed. And then it hit him, with newfound clarity, that they might all die here really soon. There were a lot of friends he couldn’t say goodbye to. A lot of friends he should have talked to when he still had the chance - that he _would_ talk to if he made it out of this, he promised himself. But as for right now… well, he could do one thing. He pulled Bruce into a hug.

“Uh, Tony…?”

“It was good to see you again, you know,” he said. Bruce relaxed a little bit.

“Yeah,” he replied, and tried to smile. “You too.”

Then Tony turned to Nebula. She looked so tense that she might snap.

“Hug me and I’ll stab you,” she warned him.

“I won’t hug you,” he promised, keeping his hands where she could see them. “It’s just, you know, we’ve been alone in a dead planet. Spent a few days drifting in space, didn’t kill each other, tried to save the universe. Guess that means we’re friends now.”

“You sound like Gamora’s loser friends,” Nebula said, and in spite of her words she sounded almost soft. Like she might even be close to smiling. She paused for a second, then sighed. “All right, Stark. I guess we are.”

There was another rumble, but this time it seemed to come from above them. It might have been the fight that was taking place out there. Or it might have been a ship landing. Tony found himself wishing that, if it _was_ Thanos, he’d just hurry up and get this over with. The waiting was the worst part of all. Suddenly, there were steps coming from one of the corridors: light, fast steps. Loki was back.

“He’s here,” he said, still catching his breath. “Get ready.”

“Everyone without magic, get out of the way,” said Wong.

Nebula was about to argue, but before she could say anything, Thanos appeared round the corner. No minions this time; no nonsense. Just him. Tony had thought he was ready for this. As it turned out, it was still intimidating as hell. Everything that could go wrong flashed across his mind in a fraction of a second. Then again, everyone else looked some degree of worried, too. Thanos smiled slowly at them. He even took the time to look around.

“Half the Infinity Stones,” he said, “all together at my reach. Give them to me now. Save yourselves the pain.”

Nebula stepped forward. That wasn’t in the plan at all, but Tony had to admire her guts.

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“Ah. But you should. All of you—”

“Skip the speech,” Tony interrupted him, because apparently he had never learned not to ramble in the face of danger. “We’ve all heard you talk enough for several lifetimes.”

“Do you really think you can stop me? You are like flies, Stark. Annoying, but I can easily swat you away. You’re nothing but a minor distraction.”

“Yeah, the thing about distractions,” he said. “They work.”

He had barely finished speaking when the ground right under Thanos’s feet simply disappeared. Strange and Wong - and the Stones they were wielding - had joined forces to open a portal beneath him. But it couldn’t have been as easy as Thanos just falling out of the universe. At the last moment, he somehow managed to hold on to the portal’s edge. The bastard was literally clinging to this dimension, and he was pissed. If he managed to climb back up, they were all dead. And the worst part of all was that there was nothing Tony could do. He’d exhausted his options. He’d done his best, he’d made his plans, but now… now it didn’t depend on him anymore. It was the worst feeling in the universe.

Then the purple and green glow of the stones was suddenly mixed with blue. The portal grew bigger. Nebula grabbed Tony’s arm and dragged him backwards, pushing Bruce along the way too. The wizards and Loki didn’t move, all of them focusing on their task. Power, Time and Space - it might work. It _would_ work. After a few seconds that felt like an eternity, the rift in reality was too large for even Thanos to fight. He roared in anger, but he let go, and he disappeared.

The portal closed and all the glowing lights went out at once.

“It worked,” Nebula said, almost in a whisper. “He’s really gone.”

“He’s really gone,” Strange agreed. He sounded exhausted, but he was smiling. “You did it, you two. You changed the future.”

“Yeah, well,” Tony said, “don’t sound so smug about it.”

“Hey, it’s always nice being right.”

“Hate to interrupt,” said Loki, “but Ragnarok is still happening. We need to get out of here.”

Wong shook his head. 

“No, that’s just you. You’re the only one from this timeline. The rest of us…”

Tony didn’t catch the rest of what he was saying. Suddenly he felt confused, as if the whole world was spinning around him. But no, that had been before, hadn’t it? In the wormhole. It was just déjà vu. This was… he wasn’t sure what it was, but it was giving him a headache. He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to make it a little better.

When he opened his eyes again, he was in New York.

It took him a moment to realize what had happened. Of course, it made sense: they _had_ reset the timeline, after all. He was back to where and when he’d been that at the time when, somewhere far away in space, Asgard was being destroyed. It had worked. It had really, truly worked. 

Even if he could have caught his breath long enough to explain to the people around him why he was laughing like a maniac, they wouldn’t have believed him, he was sure. Maybe it was for the best.

* * *

A few days later, a spaceship hovered over the skies of New York. Tony almost had a heart attack until he realized it looked very different from the last one he remembered doing that. He went from relieved to overjoyed when he received the broadcast from Thor telling him to go meet him. He put aside the thought that Thor must have given the same call to all Avengers and there’d certainly be other, more awkward meetings in his near future. He’d deal with that later. For now, he took advantage of being the only one who was already in the city, and flew to the ship as fast as he could.

Thor greeted him with a rib crushing hug. Then Hulk did the same but worse. Loki reluctantly said hello, and Thor beamed at both of them with such pure joy that Tony felt like his teeth might rot just from looking at him. They introduced him to a whole bunch of aliens, they tried to make him eat a lot of questionable looking food, and after a while Thor led him to a quieter room so they could talk alone.

“Loki tells me you saved the universe,” he said, as bluntly as if he was talking about the weather. Tony snorted.

“I’m pretty sure he told you _he_ saved the universe.”

Thor laughed, good natured, but didn’t deny it.

“But then he elaborated,” he said. “And Hulk remembers bits and pieces of it, too. It’s complicated. But the important part is that we are safe from the threat of Thanos.”

“That much is true,” Tony agreed. Then he frowned. “I’m not sure what happened with the Stones, though. Strange and Wong probably took the Time Stone back with them, but the other two… well, hopefully they were destroyed in Ragnarok. We were never really sure if that would work or not.”

“Even if they were not destroyed, they’re still lost. They’ll be lost for a long time in the ruins of Asgard.” Thor gave him a sideways look, and Tony didn’t even need to voice the question that was nagging him. “Loki doesn’t have them. I checked.”

“Good. Thanos is gone, but there’s always some other jerk, you know. Having too many Stones on Earth would be a terrible idea.”

“Agreed,” Nebula said from somewhere behind him.

Tony nearly jumped out of his skin. It was hard to glare at his asshole so-called friends, though, when Nebula was smirking and Thor laughed like a little kid.

“Seriously?” he grumbled. “What are you guys, five? This is not— Thor, really, stop laughing, it’s _not that funny_ , come on.”

“It’s funnier than your nicknames,” Thor said, and gave him a friendly but painful pat on the back. “We picked up a hitchhiker, you see. She wanted to surprise you.”

“You make it sound so corny,” said Nebula. She looked away from both of them, embarrassed. “But. Yes. I wanted to say goodbye properly, before I go and look for Gamora. I was going to and then I was suddenly back in space.”

“Yeah, it was weird. I was suddenly back home.” He grinned. “We did it.”

“We did it,” she repeated. “I could call you a friend, Tony Stark. Just not very often. Or in public.”

“I could call you a friend everywhere that embarrasses you,” he replied. “But don’t worry, I like being alive, so I won’t.”

“Good choice,” Nebula said.

There was a moment of awkward silence. Neither of them was great at this whole fluffy feelings thing, after all. Thor rolled his eyes, snorted, and put an arm around each of their shoulders.

“Come on,” he said, “tonight we celebrate.”

That, Tony thought, was the best plan he’d heard all week.


End file.
